


Shadows

by maelidify



Series: Earth Intervals [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, I say platonic but who knows?, these poor kids don't know how to make friends ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 14:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10572915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: Raven's mind will be hard to manipulate; Emori will have to go about it as genuinely as possible.





	

“It’s good to meet you, Emori.”  
  
There is a strange exhaustion hovering around Abby Griffin’s skin. It’s like a shadow darting around every curve of her face, a stubborn persistence that hides the truth in her eyes. Emori doesn’t find her _difficult_ to read, persay, but Emori is good at this kind of thing. Her face is saying, _I want to save you, but can I? Can I, really?_  
  
“Under better circumstances, that is,” Abby adds. They’d seen one another in the City of Light. They’d seen one another in Polis. They had never spoken.

(When she first stepped into Arkadia, Emori was struck by the audacity of her surroundings. These people have only been here for a scattering of days, a winter, maybe a full cycle. When did she first hear word of the people from the sky? When did the whisperings in the desert reach her and Otan? It wasn’t long ago, but it feels like seasons upon seasons ago. These people have decided they deserve a place to settle and live and keep living but there’s something hollow about it. They know they belong nowhere, and now the world is catching up with that.    
  
As they entered, John’s hand tightened around hers. Perhaps he didn’t even notice. But they were outsiders invading a community, for all means and purposes, and her moreso than him. She remembered, looking into all these eyes, these soft, tired sky people, what he had told her: the hanging, the spiraling downwards. His revenge, his torture at the hands of Trikru, the near-apathy of his people. These aren’t his people. She’s his people.  
  
There were people in clumps, working in groups, milling around in pairs. Some of them glanced at John with distaste, at her with suspicion. She curled her left hand into a fist, instinctively tried to make it smaller while maintaining its threat. And inside one of the buildings, John introduced her to a woman she already knew.)   
  
“You call these better circumstances?” Emori says lightly, and the older woman awards her a tight smile. They are in a healer’s room of sorts; the Nightblood woman John had told her about is speaking with Abby’s assistant, and there are healing tools strewn about, and grimy metal beds. Emori doesn’t like being inside buildings. The walls always feel like living things, like the arms of a cruel tree, and she’s afraid of being crushed by other living things. She prefers mountains, caves, sand dunes. Things that change, things that don’t get infected by the fears that humans carry around like parasites.  
  
Another woman enters the room, and Emori feels John shift in discomfort. She is young, and very angry, and drags one of her feet behind her in a cage of metal. She had been in the City as well, but without this bitterness. But, Emori has to concede, without it, she must have been a half person. She has the eyes of someone with a quick mind, the kind of mind that wishes it weren’t slowed down by a flawed body. Emori understands that kind of mind all too well.  
  
“Emori, Raven,” John mutters in introduction, “Raven, Em--”  
  
The girl moves past them, sparing neither of them a glance.  
  
\---  
  
They decide to travel in a group to the island. Emori makes a point to listen and learn all she can about the people with whom they’ll be traveling, especially the important ones.  
  
Abby, former leader of the Sky People, mother of Wanheda, the Clarke girl who closed the City of Light and massacred the mountain men. (“Ark royalty,” John had told her at one point, in the firelight, as he told her of his past.)  
  
Luna, who refused to be Commander, even though she could have been, especially after the death of Ontari. (The thought of Ontari is a bitter one; Emori wants to bring her back to life so that she can kill her with her own knife. The look in John’s eyes: “I didn’t have a choice.” The shadow, however slight and brief, that had come between them.)  
  
And Raven Reyes, a mechanic, a genius at manipulating tech. She’ll be the one Emori will have to work on the most. The hate Raven harbors for John is palpable, but she’s important to Abby, to Clarke, and one of the sharpest and most valuable minds to have on her side. That mind will be hard to manipulate; she will have to go about it as genuinely as possible.  
  
The night before they leave for the island, they pack one of the driving machines full of the supplies they’ll take with them. In the morning, they’ll drive to her boat, which is her only clear bargaining chip, along with her knowledge of ALIE’s island.

Arkadia is different at night, but still loud, still busy. There’s a tense glow about this camp of metal, a reluctant scurry. There’s about nine of them in their group, and they prepare together. John lifts a bag of supplies into the back of the machine and talks to a man named Nathan (“We were friends, once,” he’d told her) while Emori is given a bag of food rations from Abby, from which she deftly slips a couple bars of some sort of food. She then places the bag with the other supplies and turns, and sees the Reyes girl arguing with some of the others.  
  
“Raven, you shouldn’t be carrying--”  
  
“I said I’ve _got it_ .” The girl is carrying a pack, limping away from another girl in a huff.  
  
“Come on, you don’t want to strain yourself.”  
  
“Float yourself, Harper,” Raven snaps at the girl.  
  
“Raven--”

“Let her carry it,” Emori interrupts. The two women turn to her and it’s dark, but she can see something like surprise, something else like suspicion. Emori keeps to herself, really only talks to John. “She has two working arms, doesn’t she?”  
  
The other girl is taken aback, and Raven moves past them clumsily. When she passes Emori, she meets her eyes and gives her a short nod. Emori grins in the darkness.  
  
\---  
  
After the machine is packed, they turn back to the camp for a night’s sleep. Emori feels John’s presence behind her; she leans into his chest.  
  
“Working on Nathan?” she asks, almost suggestive, and he laughs, a low rumble in her shoulder blades. His arms wrap themselves around her waist and she wishes it was just the two of them and a world they could bite into, a world that could hide them, keep them safe. That they could still bask in that comforting wildness, coming to an end because of their ancestors. Why is the past littered with so many foolish corpses?  
  
“He wishes,” John says. “Or do you wish?”  
  
She turns around and his eyes are glinting in the artificial light of camp and she laughs as she tangles her arms around his neck. They’ll make love that night, she can tell. The temporary room they’ve been given is certainly private, and there’s that cavernous look to his eyes, hungry and hopeful.  
  
But there’s something she needs to do first.  
  
“Go on ahead,” she whispers in his ear. She curls her right hand’s fingers under his shirt, and the skin of his hip is so warm, so soft. “I’ll meet you in the room.”  
  
“That a promise?”  
  
She grins and slips one of the food bars she’d stolen into his pocket. He shakes his head at her in impressed bemusement, and turns to look back at her once before quickening his pace, catching up with Abby.  
  
Emori stays back and waits for Raven, who approaches the buildings at a forced leisurely pace. She walks with her and says nothing.  
  
“I don’t trust either of you, you know,” Raven says eventually. She doesn’t look at her, but something harsh in her face is softening, like ice that hasn’t melted all the way.  
  
“I don’t blame you,” Emori says casually, carefully.  
  
“Anyone who latches onto that… _parasite_ can’t be much better than he is.”  
  
Emori pushes away a wave of anger, tucks it into a corner of her mind. “I am no better than he is,” she agrees (which is true and it isn’t a flaw; it’s a strength, it’s a precious gem) and, because she can’t imagine Raven values complacency, says, “are you?”  
  
The other girl laughs harshly. “You bet your ass I am.” She looks at her now, that clear, perfect face twisted in some sort of pain, some shadow from the past. “But not to you grounders, I guess. Someone gets wounded, can’t fight anymore, they’re worthless, right?” It’s a calm question; she must know some warriors, perhaps some fighters from Trikru. “Never mind that the world is ending.”  
  
This line of reasoning makes sense. Raven seems more at ease around her people than the few grounders staying at Arkadia. The bitterness she holds towards their culture is in theory; for Emori, it’s in practice. She can use this.  
  
“You’re right,” Emori says. She lets bitterness creep into her voice; it’s easy, because it’s always there, swimming around in her. “The wounded who don’t die in battle aren’t valued. I’ve spoken to some of them in my tradings.” She pauses and decides. “They’re still considered more worthy of life than the _frikdreina._ ”  
  
Raven stops, looks at her. She seems to notice her now as more than an extension of John. The ragged clothes, the one gloved hand. Emori meets her gaze, unblinking.  
  
“ _Frikdreina_ ?”  
  
“Those born wounded. Ill-formed, stained.” The words are heavy on her tongue. For a slim sliver of a moment, Emori misses the City of Light, where she didn’t need to hide who she was. Where she could just be, and there was nothing wrong with being.  
  
But she much prefers this world, with its hardship and horror, because she has honesty with someone. She has clarity, and warmth, and this strange seed of love, and she can _be_ with him, exist in her purest, basest form.  
  
And damned if she’s going to let life be taken from her now.  
  
Raven is looking at her gloved hand like she’s never seen it before.  
  
“What’s wrong with it?” Raven asks quietly. “You don’t use it as often as the other one.”  
  
She’s more observant than Emori had given her credit for. But to be fair, it doesn't take much more than a glance to note its long, strange shape, its stilted movements.  
  
There’s no one else around, and Emori wants Raven to trust her, and maybe there’s a part of her that sees something in Raven’s eyes that must be in hers as well. So she unwraps her hand. Even in the darkness, the mutation is apparent.  
  
Raven takes it in, and then whistles lowly. “Pretty.”  
  
“I’m beginning to think so,” she says, candidly. “But anyone would tell you that my life should be erased from the bloodline.” Snuffed out, like a candle.  
  
Raven meets her eyes, and there’s that complexity to her gaze, that evaluation. And then something decides itself in her eyes, which seem to soften and harden at once.  
  
“Well, they can go float themselves, can’t they?” she says. “They don’t know a thing about your strength, or mine. Bunch of idiots.”  
  
Something about that startles Emori, and she laughs, just once, before wrapping her hand in her glove once more.  
  
\---  
  
When she gets to their room, Emori pauses in the doorway. John is lying on the bed (what an odd, comfortable invention), staring up at the ceiling, blue eyes clouded with something. She watches the rise and fall of his chest, the loose fit of his jacket on his shoulders, fabric a bit bunched. She’s not convinced that he belongs in a room, in a structure like this. He belongs with her, on dirt roads and boats and sand.  
  
But these people are where he came from, and part of him longs for them. She’s trying to understand it the best she can.  
  
“Sight for sore eyes?” he says, interrupting her thoughts. He looks at her and there it is, in his face, in his posture. Their connectivity, the mutual restlessness, the beauty that is him, just him, wild and hopeful. He makes her ache.  
  
“Always,” she says softly, and sits down next to him. She has avoided asking him, but she will now. He looks at her oddly, the hesitance on her face.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Raven’s injury,” she says. “It was you, wasn’t it.”  
  
He processes this and then sighs deeply, running a hand through his hair. That is all the acknowledgement she needs.  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me?”  
  
“I don’t know,” he says. “I try to forget, I guess. Not that she can.”  
  
“No, she can’t.” She studies him carefully, the flickers of guilt trying to break through the cracks in him. Try as he might, he regrets hurting the people he has hurt. She had to give up on that guilt long ago. He’s young, in a lot of ways, compared to her; she forgets sometimes.  
  
But old, too. She hates these sky people for how old they’ve made him.  
  
“John,” she says, carefully, “always tell me.”  
  
He looks at her. The guilt, the anger, all of it looks at her.  
  
“You can be the bad guy with me,” she says, using a phrase he’d used against himself in the past, and he moves closer to her, kisses her deeply. Something stirs in her heart and she holds him tightly, so tightly that he would break, were he more fragile.

\---  
  
Even through her unending restlessness on the island, Emori watches Raven unravel. She tries to be cold, clinical in her observations. Raven is full of vitality, intelligence that threatens to spill from her mind, intelligence too big for her body. It’s fascinating. It’s useful.  
  
There’s a quiet, mutual respect between them. Emori can sense it, even though they haven’t spoken at length since their conversation in Arkadia. John hasn’t fared so well, unsurprisingly; when he comes back to their shared room in the mansion in the middle of the day, hurt and bitter, anger flows through her, slow, deadly.  
  
“What happened?” she asks.  
  
“Reyes happened.” He is sullen; there are more words here. Emori waits.     
  
“I’ve told you about Finn, haven’t I?” he says. His voice is slow, flat. He’s sharing something with her, and she takes his hand as he perches next to her on the couch. She doesn’t much like this enclosed room, but she feels comfortable when he is here.  
  
“Yes, you have.”  
  
“Well, when the grounders were demanding his death, Raven tried to give me up in his place.”  
  
The words are heavy. They sit on the air. Emori doesn’t know what happened today, but this event is at the crux of it, at least for John. He looks so angry, so acidic; his eyes are knives to the air in front of them, but they are tearing up just the same.  
  
“You wanted to be her friend.” Emori notes it softly. He doesn’t respond, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  
  
She can’t relate to this feeling, she thinks. She’d hardened herself against the idea of friendship back when she was a child. The only comparable memory is in the desert, meeting someone who understood her ostracization, holding a knife to his throat and thinking _I wish I could keep him_ and, subsequently, _but I can’t._  
  
She’d proved herself wrong. But her longing for John was singular, all-powerful. He was her friend, lover, family. She’d never longed for a friend for the sake of companionship. She couldn’t let herself.  
  
She leans her head against his shoulder, and lets him grieve.  
  
\---  
  
The nightblood woman, Luna, is in the lab when Emori enters, cat-quiet, still unsure of her exact goal for this conversation.  
  
Luna looks at her carefully. She can see her very well, and it makes Emori fidgety. “She’ll be done with the test in a couple minutes,” she tells her softly. Her eyes are warm and lazy and disconcertingly wise.  
  
“Right,” Emori says. There’s a thump from within the simulation. Within the span of the past few days, Raven has turned into an ill whirlwind. When she emerges, she looks tired, ashen, angry. She looks like bad weather in the shape of a woman.  
  
As Luna slips out, Raven glares at Emori. “What do you want?” she asks, the hostility dampered by exhaustion.  
  
Emori wants to hit her for being unkind to John, and never stop hitting. But Emori also wants to say something to alleviate the exhaustion, the hopelessness. Neither seem practical.  
  
“To see how the simulations are going,” she says instead.  
  
Raven snorts. “Your boyfriend send you?”  
  
“No,” Emori says. Raven limps over to a control panel, does some calculations, swears under her breath. Emori watches her, unsure of what to say. She wants this woman’s trust, and she knows she has her grudging respect. Shouldn’t that be sufficient?  
  
“Why do you hate John?” she ends up asking.  
  
Raven doesn’t look up from her work. “Don’t tell me you don’t know.”  
  
“What he did to you? Of course I know.” Emori pauses. Raven would respond better to facts than anecdotes. She’ll use an anecdote, all the same. “When I first met him, I robbed him blind. Sent him and his companions through a dangerous desert without supplies.”  
  
Raven almost laughs, Emori can tell, but the urge dies before it reaches fruition. “So, what are we talking about here? Forgiveness?”  
  
“No,” Emori says. “Your anger helps you survive. But there are better tools than anger.”  
  
Raven looks at her then, and suddenly Emori can admit it in her mind: she doesn’t want to manipulate Raven. She wants to _trust_ her. She doesn’t know how to trust anyone other than herself and John, but the longing is there. She thinks of John’s hurt eyes, and understands that raw pain, and thinks maybe she always did.  
  
“I have to get back to work,” Raven says.  
  
Emori nods and, as she is leaving, says, “And also, the next time you lay a hand on John, I’ll make you pay.” It sneaks out of her mouth. She hasn’t shown her vindictive side to these people, afraid to make herself unlikeable, unworthy of saving. But she shows it to Raven, who laughs aloud.  
  
“Shocker,” she calls after her. Emori slips away, marveling at the strength of broken things.  
  
\---  
  
(Emori tries not to think of this in the days that pass next: the idea of friendship is too soft for the life she has to live, the ways she has to sacrifice. Her plan to ensure her own safety backfires, and she takes John down with her, the two of them bound to a ladder, John raging like a fire, like life as an assertion. Doesn’t he know he still has hope? And she clings to that hope fiercely, lets hope fill her despair, hope that he will live, that he will be able to trust again, that the parts of him that are bleeding will stop bleeding, somehow, somehow. She isn’t used to hoping for other people, but it’s a vicious emotion, more vicious than hate, than anger.  
  
And she’s looking at him as the doors close on them, holding onto this vicious, sharp hope, as voices quietly travel from the other room. She can hear them, these people who are John’s only chance now. Their guilt might protect John, if he plays his cards right. But there are no friends for him, here. There are no friends for her, either. Only shadows, and you cannot grasp shadows.  
  
She can hear them, faint, as they argue. As the Azgeda king calls her “frikdreina”, talking of her death.  
  
And then there are Raven’s words, through the doors: “Don’t call her that.” The sentence is soft.  
  
John is murderous, full of despair, cannot hear the voices drifting towards them, but the words sit on Emori’s breastbone like a bird.    
  
Something in her weeps.)

**Author's Note:**

> .  
> .  
> .  
>  This story is a bit rough, but I wanted to put it out there. 
> 
> Guys I just want Raven and Emori to be friends.


End file.
